By Hatem Abdulwahid
If culture remains after everything else disappears, politics will definitely disappear after everything else takes its proper shape, particularly in those societies which are left to choose between the tattered garment of theocracy or the state of standing naked in the face of their historical destiny. However, when trends fluctuate between a false alternative as white as a coffin and a black alternative that is as black as the dead pupil of an eye of a dead man, the choice would go in most cases for politics, and it is politics that has shaped the destiny of Iraq for these thirty decades with the media playing the role of a clown and concubine entertaining dictators and a long train of their hooligans and cutthroats. Such was the role of Iraqi media depicting blood as flowers and cemeteries as gardens in the eyes of ignorant audience.
The word all the way through these turbulent and embittered times has not changed its basic role. During the one-party system it used to serve party feudalism; now, it serves religious feudalism, it used to glorify the one leader; now, it glorifies the religious one and only one ineffable authority. The word used to polish the shoes of military generals; now, it polishes the sandals of the Ayatollahs. It was a prostitute who had taken to sleeping with the one who pays more; now, it is a slave-girl whose master possesses her flesh, blood, virginity, life and death. But, alas regardless of all this wretchedness, decadence and corruption; media continued telling political lies and the old cheats are the new turncoats who are extraordinarily capable of shifting, chameleon-like, their faces and features to fit the changes in the political milieu and, worse, feel proud of having such capacity for moving in accordance with the movement in the compass of death!
So, what has virtually, changed?
Culture in Iraq was an obedient servant, it became a professional killer. The situation is so miserable that it suffices a self-titled sectarian writer patronized by a sectarian person in power to write a few words motivated by envy to put a fellow writer to abominable death. Culture during the one-party system was intended to be a sort of trivial item internally manufactured and merchandised to half-wits; now, it turned into a commodity which our newly-made Westernized writers inadvertently pump up into the nowhere of hypothetical spaces of a non-existent audience in tandem with the half-baked cultural globalization of which their knowledge is next to nothing. The result is a grave absence in the feeling in the existence of the other in the modern Iraq’s cultural scene. Such trend will definitely end up in the culture of the ghettos and in the mawkish petty wars of words that has created various cultural barriers which separate writers from one another while politicians are being given a free rein to dictate sectarian and ethnic allegiances among writers deepening discord among them.
For instance, Fadhil Thamer the chair of the Union of Iraqi Writers has recently threatened to file a complaint against the poet now resident in London Saadi Yousef who criticized those Iraqi communists who hailed the American occupation. He filed demands for an apology and financial indemnification to be exacted on the exiled Iraqi poet. His plea was that his reputation the formal as a chair and the personal, which counts to nothing, has been damaged. The man has placed his pen and person in the service of whoever that pays him more, so what does his reputation worth?! I wonder why Hameed Saeed keeps silent before such a conglomeration of hypocrites and opportunists who we very well know that their heroic acts and literary contributions do not exist but in their corrupt imagining. We know them to be mere opportunists who place one hand in the hand of the murderer while wiping with the other the crocodile tears for the slain.
Let alone, the newly emerging class of word tradesmen represented by religious illiterate hooligans who patronize such writers. In retrospect, one may ask what has these writers added to the grand literary pyramid built by the great Iraqi minds since Ur, Nippur and Uruk? Utterly nothing!
Given this state of chaos, another question comes to the fore, this time of eligibility and authenticity. Namely, are we meritorious of the respect and recognition of the civil mind? And my answer is No! We do not deserve this respect and recognition since we persist in the efforts of falsifying truth and adumbrating its dictations. For once one feels the need to be recognized by the other, one should know himself properly. Unfortunately, Iraq has for the last forty years not presented any one who upholds the authority of culture. On the contrary, everyone has enthusiastically queued up for upholding the culture of authority which is rather scandalous in a multiethnic, multilingual and multicultural Iraq. This does strongly applies to the people who represented Iraq in the recently held Dakar Pen Conference. The participation of an Iraqi delegation had come in the wake of the formation of an Iraqi Pen Organization and the admission of this organization into the larger forum of international Pen which has been one of the main p
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